Indoor telecommunication hookup technology has evolved to a standard practice of utilizing cables with six or eight copper wire conductors for use as three or four pairs, where each pair provides one basic phone or data line. The six or eight wires in each cable are distinctively color coded and the active conductors are connected at the user end to corresponding contacts in modular jacks, typically of a six- or eight-position type that can be equipped with up to six or eight contacts respectively.
A simple single “phone line” or “data line” requires only one pair of conductors in the cable and one pair of contacts in a modular jack; however for purposes of easy identification between phone lines and data lines in installation, it has become a standard practice to utilize the six-conductor cable and the six-position modular jacks for phone lines, and to utilize the eight-conductor cable and the eight-position modular jacks for data lines. A small installation with two phone lines and one data line would most likely be implemented with a six-conductor cable for the phone lines, with four conductors connected to two contacts each of two six-position modular jacks, and with an eight-conductor cable for the data line, with two conductors connected to two conductors of an eight-position modular jack. Such a system could be implemented at lower material cost with a single six-conductor cable; however for minimum overall installation cost of labor plus material, the typical tradeoff results in the use of more than the possible minimum number of cables, and many of conductors in the cables may be left unutilized.
In the installation of phone/data lines in larger buildings and complexes, multiple cables are run from numerous user outlets in various rooms and locations to a junction facility or “phone service room” equipped with a terminal panel, known as a “patch panel”, where the cables must be identified for interconnection to external communication lines. however this does not provide identification in a large bundle of cable ends, consequently these must be correlated with the various user outlets for systematic connection to the terminal panel.
Such tracing and identification as practiced in known art is highly labor-intensive, inefficient and costly, typically requiring at least two technicians and involving a large amount of repetitious and redundant testing.